At present, enterprise documents and data are protected in several ways, each having their respective disadvantages. Briefly, documents and/or data may be encrypted and uploaded to a cloud computing application. Obviously, this method leaves sensitive data and/or documents exposed to unwanted decryption if encryption keys are breached. In addition, encryption may break application/user functions such as Search, Sort, etc. In addition, many cloud providers will not accept documents exceeding a certain file size (e.g., five megabytes). Moreover, company policies may prohibit the exportation of sensitive data to a cloud application, while some markets (e.g., China, Germany, and Switzerland) may have very strict data exportation laws, such that documents and/or data stored in a Europe-based cloud may not be exported, for example, to a United States based location.
To mitigate some of these problems, various enterprises have stored unencrypted documents and/or data to a local data storage system (e.g., a token vault or file system) through the use of a tokenization system. To gain access to this data, and to leverage cloud applications for data and document distribution within the enterprise, the data and/or documents have been tokenized (i.e., associate the documents or data with a random alphanumeric string or file path) and the token stored to the cloud application. Disadvantages exist here as well. For example, a hacker or disgruntled employee may hack into the token vault or file system, and gain access to the unencrypted documents and/or data stored on the enterprise system.